Western Digital, a leading producer of hard disk drives (HDDs), on Wednesday unveiled its new hard drive that offers unprecedented capacity with only two platters, which means lower noise, lower power consumption, lower heat dissipation, higher reliability and lower price.

WD’s Caviar SE16 640GB is hardly a capacity or performance champ, but the combination of its specifications as well as potential features makes it a very interesting offering. The HDD sports Serial ATA-300 interface, native command queuing technology, 16MB of cache as well as a plethora of WD’s proprietary technologies to boost performance.

But the most important feature of WD Caviar SE16 640GB is two platter design, which means lower cost, lower noise, lower heat and higher performance in certain cases. As a result, the new hard disk drive has all chances to become truly popular among consumers.

“The 640GB capacity point will be an important one for our desktop customers, and WD is leading high-volume shipments to the channel and OEM customers. Two-platter hard drives have always been the perfect balance of value, capacity and performance for many of our customers. Today’s common two-platter drives are limited to 500GB, but we are expanding capacity by 28% on the same design with WD’s leading technology heads and disks,” said Don Bennett, general manager and vice president of WD’s desktop business unit.

WD Caviar SE16 640GB (model WD6400AAKS) hard drives may be ordered on the company’s online store and through select distributors and resellers. Manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP) for the WD Caviar SE16 640 GB is $139.99.